A majority of students in Rhodes' residences have PCs and pay for ResNet access and thus have access to the network from their rooms, but there are still many students who can't afford that. So the idea of providing a PC in the residence's common room for basic e-mail access, meal booking for those people was suggested.

We (systems administrators) had some concerns about unattended machines in res -- lab machines are carefully set up with limited rights, etc. -- whereas these machines wouldn't be supported by I.T. nor necessarily be entitled to site-licensed software. So I set up a locked-down FreeBSD installation with X and Firefox, which is secure and completely free.

The machine boots into X (autodetecting video hardware at each boot), and starts Firefox. I've hacked Firefox's chrome so that it goes into fullscreen mode at startup, and removed the UI controls to go out of fullscreen mode, so you can't get access to the rest of the desktop. I picked Blackbox as the window manager, as it has no built-in keyboard support, so there's no chance of accessing the window manager's functions to start any other programs. The machine itself has been hardened with a restrictive firewall (which only allows outgoing connections to our proxy server), only /var is mounted read-write (for reliability purposes), and the browser user's home directory is restored from a tar archive every time the browser is restarted (so no-one can permanently change the browser's settings). It might not be completely bulletproof, but it's whole lot better than Windows 98. :)

One of these machines has been installed in a residence so far. According to the warden of the res, it's been well-received, and our traffic graphs show that it's used almost continually. It's nice to see it being put to good use.